Accra has been picked by the World Bank for a pioneering waste reduction plan. For the city’s informal recyclers, it’s a false solution.
It is 5 am in Accra. The chatter of weaver birds and the rasp of pied crows is gradually drowned out by ‘tro-tro’ minibuses and old cars. Wood smoke and diesel fumes rise in the air—along with the pungent smell of decaying refuse.
Ghana’s capital, home to almost three million people, is at the centre of the global plastic waste crisis. Waste picker Lydia Bamfo has been on the front line for 25 years.
The World Bank has a solution: plastic credits that polluters can buy to ‘offset’ damage to the environment. But Bamfo, 51, is “sick and tired” of the offsetting scheme that, she believes, has done nothing to stem the tide of waste engulfing the city—or benefit waste pickers struggling to make a living.
“I am doing the work without a profit,” she says.
As the sun rises, the mother of seven waits in her ‘office’, a lean-to shack in a yard piled high with recyclable rubbish. A motor tricycle bumps noisily down the unpaved road before pulling in.
Bamfo, hair protected from the dust by a white scarf, climbs in next to the driver, neatly tucking in her pink dress, and the pair zoom past the wooden shopfronts. On a wealthier road, the tricycle pulls up at a house with high whitewashed walls topped with an electric security fence. A door opens and a man in a dressing gown wordlessly slings them a bag of rubbish.
The tricycle jolts on, towards the outskirts of the city where the pollution eases up and banana plants sprout more easily. Along the way, Bamfo calls out to a small army of waste pickers with handbarrows, all harvesting the city’s endless crop of plastic detritus.
Returning to the yard to escape the fierce sun, she finds a waiting queue of young men and boys, each carrying mosquito-net sacks crammed with blue-silver plastic bottles like fishermen returning from sea.
Greeting every one by name, she weighs each catch on scales hanging from the roof and records the weight and pay in Ghanaian cedis in a repurposed ledger marked “Teacher’s Register”.
“I always wanted to be a secretary,” says Bamfo, smiling. “I like writing.”
‘I was an orphan’
High density polyethylene (HDPE)—a widely used plastic found in water tanks, bins and detergent bottles—is the most valuable catch, earning pickers about five cedis (50 US cents) a kilogramme from recyclers. It’s a pittance, but in a city where many subsist below the minimum wage of 19.97 cedis ($1.90) a day, it’s a living.
But the work also carries a stigma. When Bamfo first started picking waste, neighbours called her a vulture and a witch—a serious accusation in Ghana that can lead to violence. Her family cut her off.
Now Bamfo leads the Accra Borla Tricycle Association (‘borla’ means rubbish in Twi, the regional language), representing 8,000 workers.
“I was an orphan like these children once,” she says, nodding towards the young pickers, many of whom also have no families and eat with Bamfo and her children in the small wooden house she has built in the waste yard.
“It’s why I look after them,” she laughs. “They call me Mother Christmas!”
Choking beaches
Ghana is awash with plastic. Each year, the West African country imports more than two million tonnes of plastic products, according to NGO Earth Care Ghana.
Ghanaians also rank alongside Nigerians as the region’s biggest dumpers of plastic. In all, the nation throws out more than one million tonnes of plastic a year, equivalent in weight to more than half a million cars. That amounts to around 31 kilogrammes of plastic waste per person.
That’s far less than citizens in the United States and United Kingdom, who lead the world in generating plastic waste. But richer countries have the means to deal with the pollution (often by foisting it onto poorer ones: last year the US sent almost half a million tonnes of old plastic abroad).
It only takes a walk along Accra’s seafront to sense the scale of the dumping. Under different circumstances, the seashore would be a focus for locals and tourists alike. But in Accra’s oldest district, Jamestown, wooden huts turn their backs to an ocean that can be found only through a maze of alleys emerging onto a beach barely visible for rubbish.
Drifts of plastic gather around the bows of fishing boats and black bags bubble to the surface with each rolling wave.
Like Bamfo’s pickers, staff at the Labadi Beach Hotel are up at dawn clearing space for the deckchairs amid the plastic tide. But the sand remains striped with undulating rainbows of billions of microplastic particles too tiny to remove.
‘Into the fire’
“Not many people could go through what happened to me and survive,” says Bamfo, during a break in weighing empty water bottles.
After her parents divorced, her father sent her and her brother to live with their grandmother in the southern city of Cape Coast. In a school overlooked by a white castle that was once a British slave prison, she excelled at French.
But learning was a privilege that she was barred from until she had sold enough kenkey balls—fermented corn dumplings—on the streets each day. Back at her grandmother’s house, she and her brother were not welcome.
“She insulted us. She beat us. She told me, ‘I have to take care of my own children, not you.’ She gives them money to go to school, gives them food. But we had to struggle.”
Bamfo was treated well when her father turned up for a visit. Once he had gone, food, clothes and sleeping mats were all taken away.
In despair, she wrote to her father: “If you do not come and take us from here, I will remove your name from mine.” Eventually, he sent her to his mother’s sister in a village instead.
But her great aunt mistreated her, too.
“I fell into the fire,” she says. “I was housegirl, houseboy, cooker, cleaner, everything.”
Eventually, she went on strike. As punishment, her great aunt made her sleep on the porch. But there was a school opposite the house, and she was at least able to continue her studies.
Toxic mountain
It’s lunchtime under a sweltering sun and Makola Market, Accra’s biggest, is teeming with vendors.
Bamfo has stopped briefly to buy mangoes. She is travelling by tro-tro to her daughter, Keren, who runs a small shop at a landfill site in Tema, an industrial town east of Accra.
Outside the bus window, a perfect green hill rises alongside the motorway, too smooth and verdant to form a natural part of the landscape. About 400 metres long, it is a symbol of Ghana’s battle with waste.
Underneath is an old landfill site. In 2019, it burst into flames, releasing clouds of toxic smoke. The government covered it with AstroTurf and now thin chimneys release the dangerous gases that build up inside. On hotter days, the air above the flues ripples like a mirage.
A short distance away, a long tailback of lorries points the way to the new landfill.
It’s a dystopian vision: A craggy peak, rearing up to the height of a five-storey building, crumbles away to reveal stratified layers of stinking refuse—an archaeological record of the world’s addiction to plastic.
On the skyline, hard-hatted humans edge along the ridge like mountaineers. Lower down, goats rummage and boys on tricycles zoom between piles of waste.
Waiting for Bamfo at the foot of the mountain is Johnson Doe, the head of the landfill’s 700-strong waste pickers’ association.
“That is toxic,” he warns, stepping over a stream of black water audibly gurgling gas bubbles. The pair start to climb the slope of rubbish.
“Medical waste is the most dangerous,” he says, explaining that byproducts from a nearby Chinese-owned factory are dumped here. Working here is risky, but Doe, 38, is proud that his team removes 40 percent of the landfill’s contents for recycling.
At the summit, workers take breaks from the strong wind in makeshift shelters before continuing the hunt for anything that can be sold for a few cedis to recyclers. Young men jump onto each fresh truckload, while women work the less risky waste fields beyond.
“A man lost his fingers doing that three days ago,” says Doe, who came to Accra hoping to study but could not afford the university fees. He began picking waste at age 16. Now he wants to break the poverty cycle and help his four-year-old daughter become a doctor.
The odds are stacked against them.
Keren, Bamfo’s daughter, dreamed of escape just like her mother, but has paid a heavy price for growing up beside dumps.
“I want to leave but I don’t know how”
“I have headaches, bad chest pains, I struggle to breathe,” says the 26-year-old inside her shop at the base of the landfill, a business she set up to escape the fumes outside.
“I want to leave and do something else but I don’t know how,” she says. Five years ago, she qualified as a teacher but hasn’t found work. Her own children, aged nine and four, are playing nearby.
Washing hangs on a line outside, even though doctors told Keren that drying her clothes here aggravates her allergies. Sometimes the blood from her nose is almost black.
Beneath the clothes line, a chicken pecks at a block of polystyrene, visibly swallowing the tiny balls.
‘Plastic neutral’
With governments unable or unwilling to halt the plastic tsunami, financiers have turned to the markets for a solution.
At a United Nations summit on plastic pollution last year, a World Bank official promoted a $100 million ‘plastics bond’. Investors lent money to two plastic collection projects in Ghana and Indonesia.
Every tonne of waste collected generates a ‘credit’ certificate that plastic-producing companies can purchase to ‘offset’ pollution caused by their products. Buy enough, and the companies can claim to be “plastic neutral”.
One of the delegates to the UN summit in South Korea was Bamfo’s friend Doe, Africa’s representative for the International Alliance of Waste Pickers—a union representing 40 million waste picker workers globally.
At the failed talks, oil-producing nations that sell the raw ingredients for plastics repeatedly blocked proposals to cut global plastics production. In an attempt to break the stalemate, the UN is meeting again in Switzerland this month.
Programmes like the World Bank bond are frustrating, says Doe, because they cost millions of dollars but none of the money reaches his workers living below the poverty line on Accra’s plastics mountain.
“The support is meant for us but doesn’t come. We are not on the internet, on computers every day to write grants and proposals. We are always here,” he says, waving towards the landfill.
In May this year, Doe says he and Bamfo received a visit from a representative of the Alliance to End Plastic Waste, an industry initiative backed by oil giants Shell, ExxonMobil and TotalEnergies, and petrochemicals makers Dow Chemical and LyondellBasell. The official toured the landfill, made enquiries, and disappeared, says Doe.
“Researchers come, they ask us questions, they write grants. But the money is going to other places,” he says. “If you want to help me, you don’t give somebody else money. Train me.”
The World Bank did not respond to SourceMaterial and Al Jazeera’s requests for comment. In an online statement last year, its chief financial officer, Anshula Kant, said that the Ghana project will “create a win-win with the local communities and ecosystems that benefit from less pollution” and that the bank planned to issue more bonds to back plastic credits schemes.
Drowning in plastic
The beneficiary of the World Bank plastic credits bond in Ghana is the Asase Foundation, a non-profit group that buys plastic from waste pickers and turns it into pellets or blocks to be recycled into new plastic products.
An afternoon downpour hammers on the foundation’s corrugated roof. In a spotless concrete yard in Accra, metre-long sausage bags of plastic waste are neatly piled.
They mostly contain water sachets: 50 pesewas (five US cents) for a water sachet compared with five cedis (50 US cents) for a water bottle; clean water is often sold in the plastic wrappers that now litter the city’s streets.
Inside a shed emblazoned with the logo of the Alliance to End Plastic Waste, workers with earplugs feed old single-use plastic into roaring shredders. The resulting fibres are cleaned, blowdried and bagged.
In a second warehouse, the plastic is melted and turned into pellets, or poured into moulds shaped like wooden planks to produce “plastic lumber”. School desks made from it are stacked outside, impervious to the rain.
“Ghana has been handed the plastic problem without a solution, and we are all being drowned in it,” says Hilda Addah, a social worker who co-founded and leads the Asase Foundation. “We are here doing our part to ensure we find a solution to the plastic that is in our environment.”
When asked if plastic credits help companies ‘get away’ with plastic pollution, Addah said: “We should all be responsible for what we put out. If you put plastic out there, you must have a mechanism for retrieval.”
Asase employs 100 workers at its three recycling plants, where, unlike Accra’s landfill pickers, they benefit from regular salaries and pensions.
But Bamfo and Doe say the Asase project, co-founded by a former senior Dow Chemical employee and with $1.7 million from industry-backed Alliance to End Plastic Waste, and a further $3.15 million via the World Bank bond investors to expand, has not empowered waste pickers.
Instead, they say, it has simply set itself up as a competitor to their own collection operations that provide an income to some of the city’s most deprived residents.
In 2023, Doe accused Asase’s buyers of undercutting his business by bypassing middlemen who trade in plastics and belong to his association. A fight broke out with another picker selling plastic to Asase. Doe was cleared of wrongdoing but says the legal fees cost him 6,500 cedis ($622)—more than three months’ salary—and nearly bankrupted him.
Tiny trickle
An even bigger issue, experts say, is that plastics offsetting ultimately does nothing to address global plastic waste.
It’s a “game of greenwashing”, says Anil Verma, an academic at the University of Toronto who has studied waste pickers in Brazil.
“By the time you follow the money down, by the time it reaches anyone on the front line, it’s a tiny trickle,” he says. “It’s doing nothing to seriously reduce the demand for plastic.”
The real reason big industry supports plastics credits is because they can claim to be addressing the problem without cutting production—or profit, says Doe, arguing that funds for plastic credit schemes would be better spent supporting existing waste picker collectives.
“Plastic credits are a false solution,” he says.
Responding to questions from SourceMaterial and Al Jazeera, Asase’s Addah says her foundation’s programme does not aim to stop the use of plastic packaging or its import to Ghana, only to finance the collection and recycling of waste.
“Plastic credits are a false solution”
Plastic credits “secure the jobs for waste pickers and provide them with fair and stable income and health care insurance,” she says. “Seeking plastic credit as a financing mechanism does not in any way exclude the waste picker workers.”
Addah says Asase never ‘undercuts’ waste pickers. “Just like all our customers, we negotiate the prices,” she says. “We do not buy if the price is above market value.”
Asase bought 4,180 tonnes of waste plastic last year, and recycled almost a quarter of that into pellets for plastics factories, according to its data.
Only 38 tonnes of plastic lumber have been made so far. The rest of the weight was water and sand, with a small amount of plastic waste going back to landfill, says Addah.
A registry published by Verra, the company which verifies the plastic credits, shows Asase has issued 2,890 credits so far. Most of the buyers’ names are not provided, but those listed include Soulfresh, a food supplier, and cosmetics companies Pacifica and MyChelle.
‘Malaria risk’
By focusing on water sachets, Asase is replicating waste pickers’ work while ignoring more serious problems, says Doe. Asase doesn’t gather multi-layered plastic of the type used in food snack packets. It can’t be recycled and is building up in landfills.
“Plastic credit projects should probably not be handling recyclable plastic,” says Kerry Wilson, a researcher at the National Institute for Occupational Health in South Africa. “Waste pickers are already handling that, it already has value.”
Instead, governments should recognise existing waste picker worker associations and fund them, she adds.
Like other plastics offsetting initiatives, Asase does not require buyers of its credits to reduce the amount of plastic they release into the environment.
Even Nestle, the world’s second biggest plastic polluter according to a 2023 report, thinks there are better solutions. The company argues instead for “extended producer responsibility” laws that would hold manufacturers accountable for waste from their products even after selling them.
Zanetor Agyeman-Rawlings, an Accra MP, says plastic blocks drains in the rain, causing stagnant pools that become breeding grounds for malaria-carrying mosquitoes. Now, she wants Ghana’s parliament to hold polluters liable.
“My constituency is literally drowning in plastic,” she says.
Anne Thiel, a spokeswoman at Verra, which approves Asase’s credits for sale internationally, says plastic credits are a way to mobilise finance “to scale plastic waste collection and recycling to accelerate transition to a circular economy”.
“While plastic credits are currently not designed to directly reduce plastic production, they put a price on plastic waste, motivating companies to implement plastic reduction actions upstream of their value chain.”
Asase’s Addah says the foundation has created “a workable community-based collection and recycling model.
“It’s a model that works in developing communities with poor waste management infrastructure.”
The Ghanaian government did not respond to requests for comment.
‘We clean the city’
Back at the waste yard, business has died down for the day. Bamfo and her youngest children, Nkunim, 10, and Josephine, 6, are emptying the last few bottles. She will be in bed by 8 pm, rising at midnight for her Bible studies before starting work again at dawn.
Bamfo never thought she would become a waste picker.
She was 19 when she finally gained her school certificate, and by selling oranges she scraped together enough money for a secretarial course. But she couldn’t afford a typewriter.
While the other girls tapped away at their machines, she drew the keyboard on her exercise book and practised on that, pressing her fingers into the paper.
Soon, the money ran out. Instead of the office job she dreamed of, she found work breaking stones on a building site.
“At that moment, I see myself—I’m a big loser, and there’s nothing,” says Bamfo, leaning forward on her office chair to keep a watch for any final delivery tricycles. “I see the world is against me.”
Then one morning she woke to find the building site had disappeared overnight, replaced by a dump: truckloads of water sachets, drinks bottles and nylon wigs.
Her five children lay sleeping. Her husband, as usual, had not come home. To buy cassava to make banku—dumpling stew—she needed money urgently.
A friend had told her that factories in the city would buy plastic waste for a few cedis a kilogramme. It was one of the lowliest jobs there was, involving not only backbreaking labour but stigma and shame.
“If you are a woman doing this waste picking, people think you have no family to care for you,” she says. “They think you are bad. They think you are a witch.”
She came home one day to find her husband had abandoned her. But not before he had called her father to tell him his daughter had become a “vulture”.
Estrangement from her father only compounded the shame. To escape her neighbours’ taunts, Bamfo moved with her children to the other side of the city.
There, she took over her small yard, buying waste from pickers and selling it on to factories and recycling plants. Bit by bit, she built a wooden house. Eventually, she plucked up the courage to phone her father.
“I said, come and see the work I do. See that it is not something to feel bad about.”
When her father saw the yard and the tricycle teams that had become Bamfo’s business, Nkosoo Waste Management (Nkosoo is Twi for progress), he couldn’t help but be impressed.
“You are not a woman, you are a man,” she recalls him telling her once, half admiring and half accusing. “The heart that you have—even your brother doesn’t have that heart.”
Now she hopes to pass on some of her resilience. King, her supervisor at the yard, slept on a nearby dumpsite as a small child and says Bamfo and her waste business saved him. “I cannot say a bad thing about her. She is my mother.”
As night settles on Accra, the polluting plastic tide has crept a little higher. But Bamfo has, she says, found dignity in the fight to keep it at bay.
“It is important work we do,” she says. “Sometimes I feel very sad and bad about not getting the education I wanted. But we clean the city. I think of that.”
